


HUNGER

by Nika_Bo



Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:01:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27578216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nika_Bo/pseuds/Nika_Bo
Summary: Love. War. Life. Death.Happens after Dunkirk. Way after.
Relationships: Alex & Tommy (Dunkirk)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	HUNGER

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this a while back. Thought it was fitting to post today, 75 years after WW2 ended.
> 
> Enjoy, be kind, you're wonderful!

Hunger.

That’s what he associates Alex with from the very first moment they meet. Hunger. Raw, desperate. Unrelenting and insatiable hunger.

For help. For life. For buttered sandwiches with jam. For air. For sleep. For survival. For home. For deliverance. For peace. For forgiveness. For health. For love.

Alex is hungry for it all. His eyes bright with want and need. His hands – large and calloused – reaching, touching, holding on. His body flexing, flailing, fighting. Stubborn. Determined. Hungry. Muscled arms reaping, clinging, enveloping. That mouth, so lush and sensual, licking, sucking, swallowing in ravenous greed as if life was a full chalice to drain at a banquet, a roast to devour, a last supper’s loaf of bread, a mouldy slab of chocolate in a trench, a honeyed brioche on a sunny Sunday morning, a final kiss.

Hunger drives him. Eradicates everything else. Manners. Mercy. All sacrificed for satiation. Satisfaction. Survival.

At first Tommy is amazed. Then disgusted. Then awed. Then enarmoured.

He has never met anyone with such hunger, such visceral desire to consume, to feed, to fill, to bite and gnaw and tear into chunks of food, of flesh, of _LIFE_. Subtlety, decency, propriety… all forsaken for the one thing. To feast. To ease and calm that primal force of hunger.

Sometimes he thinks Alex is a demon, a vampire or succubus, intent on nothing but to feed, devour, consume. A beast from an otherwordly realm.

He is beautiful enough. Has been from the start.

Those harsh, angular lines of his gaunt face and slight body, muscled but skinny beneath the deceiving thickness of his uniform. That violent slash of pink lips against the stark contrast of black oil on his blanching, wet skin: like diabolical darkness running out of his brown hair, like winter frost coming over summer and the light tan fading to bluish cold with every minute of him paling in the channel water. Those luminous, wide eyes like green fires.

And Tommy knows if he forgets all else once this war is over, forgets everything since Dunkirk, if he forgets every single day of fear and panic and strife and loss in the war, even if he forgets himself, dying on a field in Normandy, this, _this_ will be the one thing he’ll remember: The green fire of burning hunger in Alex’s eyes!

***

Violence surrounds him. Surrounds them. It is everywhere. In the air they breathe, pregnant with smoke and gunpowder, the stink of sweat and fear omnipresent.

It’s in the noise of screams and exploding grenades, fractured by the cruel staccato of machine gun salves. It’s in the upturned soil beneath their boots, the cold mud, heavy and saturated with blood clinging to their bodies and hands, dripping, oozing, suffocating them while they grasp at it with shaking hands, desperate to darken their pallid faces, to turn invisible in the night, camouflaged, to disappear right before the eyes of the enemy and become one with the earth.

Burying themselves alive in furrows, puddles, craters, in any indentation deep enough to hide them from a German Feldstecher, they are lying still like corpses, playing dead, half hidden under shredded bodies of rotting comrades, breathing shallow decay, inhaling death, immobile, shrouded before their time – already ghosts, waiting to rise in the autumn fog of the morning of capitulation.

Another battle lost, another garrison slaughtered.

Hundreds of young men perished and leaving children and wives and parents, an entire nation back home, grieving and bereft, all cheated of a life in peace and summer sunshine. It has all merged into an endless night in Tommy’s mind and he can’t even remember the last time he saw the sun. There’s only fog and rain and night and darkness in his head.

And cold, everything so cold. Cold and cruel and harsh. Numbing them, turning them blunt and hopeless.

Death and violence. It is a constant force, intruding, poisoning them day by day. Darkening everything.

And yet… And yet there _is_ heat. There _is_ sun. There _is_ fire. So much of it that it borders on a miracle and it is all because of Alex.

Alex, who day after day blazes through the deepest darkness and despair, a flame ever since that unexpected kindling in Scotland, a torch setting him on fire and Tommy comes alight with love, with want, with passion, turns to gasoline for Alex, willingly, consumed and forged, amalgamated into something like steel, indestructible and eternal.

Against the stink of death and blood and fear Alex is like flowers and cut grass, like honey, fresh baked bread, like almonds toasted over fire, like sugar caramelising, bitter and burned and yet so sweet. Beneath the harsh, cold, sharp exterior he is so soft and warm. The heat of his mouth and the flame of his touch all licking over Tom, setting him on fire and he combusts. He blazes so bright for Alex that it's an obscene pyre that must be visible all the way back to England and he thinks if they burn any brighter they will both disintegrate, dissipate like sparks, dancing and spiralling upwards into the velvet benevolence of the sky, forever swirling in the night.

He wants to smoulder for Alex, for his ravenous mouth and hungry hands, light up for his touch and kiss and insatiable love, is overwhelmed by the other man's stubborn rejection of caution, propriety, decency, shame and humility in the face of utter adversity on every level.

And yet he doesn’t care anymore because they are once again surrounded by death, they are in hell and the devil is walking beside them with his legions of demons each day and night, looming ever closer and Alex is spitting him in the face, is still laughing, his green eyes a fire of almost insanity, defiant and stubborn, triumphant to wrench one more day, one more night, one more hour out of Satan’s hands, bargaining a small eternity for himself and Tommy so they can burn together, burn for one another, burn each other with searingly desperate, consummating passion.

“Turn me to ashes!” Tom begs broken-voiced, open and ready and Alex is over him like arson, inside him like napalm, incendiary and it’s all-consuming, scorches his skin off like paper, cooks his bones and flesh, melts his very soul and Tom screams into the skies against that weak chorus of wails from injured soldiers around them, dying and rotting on that field.

It is a single defiant caw of life and Alex jams his hand against his mouth to stifle that ecstasy because it is utter blasphemy to still celebrate love in this macabre Theater of Death and Tommy claws at Alex’s skin as if he is a loaf of bread he can tear apart, bites down on that frantic pulse in Alex’s neck where – despite dirt and blood and fear – he still smells like honey and butter on a baked brioche and it’s like that morning in Voissanty when everything was golden and perfect and the world and time was theirs to squander and waste.

And Tommy is transcended….


End file.
